What is City4Age?

City4Age (Elderly-friendly city services for active and healthy ageing) is a research and innovation project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Programme. The first and core objective of City4Age is to enable Ambient Assisted Cities or Age-friendly Cities. The project aims to create an innovative framework on ICT tools and services that can be deployed by European cities in order to: enhance early detection of risk related to frailty and Mild Cognitive Impairments (MCI), and provide personalised intervention that can help the elderly population to improve their daily life and also promote positive behaviour changes.

City4Age will activate urban communities to facilitate the role of social/health services and of families in dealing with cognitive impairments and frailty in the elderly population.

The challenge is to demonstrate that cities play a pivotal role in the early detection of (MCI and frailty) risks and subsequent interventions. The core idea is that smart cities can collect data in an unobtrusive way about individual behaviours. This data can be used in two ways:

- to identify segments of the population potentially at risk and,
- to closely monitor individuals already identified as specifically in need of close monitoring.
In the latter case, negative changes of behaviours can be detected, prompting individualized intervention.